Re: A question about NetworkManager's use of dnsmasq

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2012-09-11 at 15:19 -0400, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
> Just curious but ... I noticed that the dnsmasq for caching that 
> NetworkManager starts has the command parameter "--keep-in-foreground" 
> specified.
> 
> Why?
> 
> According to the dnsmasq doc: --keep-in-foreground or -k does:
> 
> Do not go into the background at startup but otherwise run as
> normal. This is intended for use when dnsmasq is run under dae‐
> montools or launchd.

NM monitors the process and attempts to fall back to /etc/resolv.conf if
for some reason dnsmasq crashes; for the Connection Sharing stuff it
attempts to restart the connection if dnsmasq crashes.  It's a lot
simpler to do that if the process you're watching doesn't fork/exec like
daemons often do, plus the fork/exec is completely unnecessary since NM
internally does most things asynchronously, and thus doesn't need the
fork/exec dance because it's not blocking on the process waiting for it
to exit.

Dan